Why Hope Is A Great Strategy

Perhaps you’ve heard the expression, hope is not a strategy. I beg to differ.
Hope is an excellent strategy. It’s the first step to solving any problem.

Consider what happens when you have no hope.

Imagine you’re facing a difficult situation. If you don’t have any hope, you
won’t have any energy. With no energy, you don’t come up with any ideas. Without
any ideas you can’t take any action. So you remain stuck.

I call it the Circle of Hopelessness because it’s an endless loop. No Hope.
No energy. No ideas. No action. No success. Which leads you right back to
hopelessness.

Now consider what happens it you start with hope.

Hope give you energy, which helps you generate ideas, which enables you to
take action, which results in some success, which gives you more hope, which
gives you even more energy.

That single decision – choosing hope – puts you on an entirely different
trajectory.

The important thing to note here is, you don’t need to how to solve the
problem; you just need to be hopeful that you can. You don’t a concrete plan to
be hopeful.

Hope gives you the energy to generate the ideas that will eventually crate
the plan. Rather than being on an endless loop, you’re moving upward, one rung
at a time up a ladder.

Webster’s defines hope as: To desire with the expectation of fulfillment.
To expect with confidence.

Harriet Tubman and Martin Luther King didn’t start out with fully baked
plans. They started with hope.

Here’s how I taught my Elementary Sunday school class about Tubman and King’s
Ladder’s of Hope:

Harriet Tubman - Born a slave in 1820.

Hope

Energy – Visions and dreams about a different life.

Ideas - Underground Railroad.

Action –19 trips south.

Success – Saved over 300 slaves

Martin Luther King – Born in 1929 into segregation

Hope

Energy - Studied non-violent change

Ideas - I have a dream

Action - Bus boycott, march on Washington

Success – Ended segregation

That initial spark of hope that propelled Harriet and Martin to dream bigger
dreams, and eventually create bigger plans than they ever could have envisioned
at the outset.

Here’s the other secret about hope - Hope attracts help. Hopelessness just
attracts more of the same.

Many people find it hard to be hopeful when they can’t see a clear path out
of a problem. But the important lesson here is that you don’t need a plan to be
hopeful. Hope is the first step. The plan may not come for a while; hope gives
you the energy to create it.

Here’s how you can use the Ladder of Hope next time you’re facing a problem.

Hope – Tell yourself, you can change this. Don’t worry about how to do it
yet.

Ideas - Examine the problem from other perspectives. Come up lots of ideas,
big and small.

Action – Do one small easy thing first. Ask others for help.

Success – Remind yourself and others that you did it! If you did one thing,
you can do more.

Hope, it’s a good thing.

Lisa Earle McLeod helps organizations
win the hearts and minds of customers and employees. She is the author of three
books included the best-seller, The
Triangle of Truth: The Surprisingly Simple Secret to Resolving Conflicts
Large and Small, A Washington Post Top 5 Book for Leaders.

She is an international keynote speaker and consultant who has been seen on
The Today show and featured in Forbes, Fortune, CEO Read and The Wall Street
Journal. You can reach her at
www.LisaEarleMcLeod.com.